Beware of spoilers! The final confrontation of the Tyranny of Dragons campaign waits at the Well of Dragons, a citadel and a graveyard of dragons. A death knight named Naergoth Bladelord and lich rule there for the Cult of the Dragon. I already had a lich and a death knight, but I wanted another undead knight with the purple colors of the cult. Malek the Necromancer from the Reaper Bones Kickerstarter was perfect!

Malek the Necromancer (77172) by Bob Ridolfi is a little over the top as far as cliché necromancer miniatures go. He’s got a torn cape, a bone armor, a staff with skulls and bat wings, a face mask. He’s standing on top of skulls, and he’s showing his bare legs because wearing trousers would not be 1980s enough? Likewise, he looks more like Skeletor than anything else.

Here are four versions from around the internet, that really show what you can do with this miniature. They also show the ugly staff:

I wanted to use this figure for Naergoth Bladelord, the death knight commander of the citadel in the Well of Dragons. He’s got a very cool artwork by Bryan Syme and I used the colors depicted in it for my version of the miniature.

Basing and Priming

I did not like the staff at all. While I can live with a skull, the bat wings had to go. I used a standard 1-inch plastic base and glued some sand on it and then primed the miniature in black and white as usual.

Painting

For the cloak and cloth, I used the usual purple as for all the other Dragon Cultists. First, I tried to paint the legs as undead skin. But it looked silly and I guess did not make much sense: Naergoth is an undead, the miniature itself depicts a (not undead) necromancer. So I decided to paint the legs in dark gray to look like … ehm … leggings.

For the rest of the miniature, I used some metallic colors and browns to make him look like an important boss mini. But not too much, since Naergoth’s color palette is pretty limited in the artwork.

Overall, the figure was fun to paint, and it turned out nicely! It’s far from my favorite, but at least it only took one evening to paint 😉